In 2017, Transcom embarked upon an important partnership with one of the largest businesses in the postal and logistics sector, present in 220 countries across the globe and with a workforce exceeding 350,000 employees.

For this Client, Transcom currently manages customer service for the German market. The services are provided from the Belgrade facility, one of our multilingual hubs able to offer agents with near-native language proficiency.

Transcom was selected after successfully managing a test project for six months: it was the prime-quality language skills, together with the excellent level of the services provided, that persuaded the Company to sign the contract. The agreement currently covers the management of the voice channel for the German market, but the Client is examining further proposals to extend the service to other European markets (making full use of the multi-lingual skills the Belgrade contact centre is able to offer) and to cover non-voice channels (email, chat, etc.). During these first few months of the agreement, the Client has already had the opportunity to verify that Transcom’s rightshoring proposal is able to guarantee a winning price-quality ratio, in which thequality of the domestic market is offered at the competitive price made possible by a nearshore contact centre.

For the same Client, we are currently providing – from the multilingual centre in Gdansk (Poland) – another highly innovative service aimed at the German market: Video Identity Verification. July 1st saw the entry into force in Germany of an anti-terrorism law that requires consumers to prove their identity in order to purchase a number of products, such as telephone cards. Consumers may do so in person, in the points of sale, or digitally, via computer or app, through a Video Chat platform belonging to our Client. Our specialized agents in the Gdansk contact centre take a photo of the consumer, with the aid of a webcam, and use the video identification procedure to securely verify their documents and identity.

Although newly born, the partnership with this important Client appears more than likely to evolve into a lasting relationship thanks also to another distinguishing factor: Transcom is able to boast lengthy experience in the logistics industry, with important international brands in a variety of countries among its most faithful clients. This expertise gives us access to the best practices developed and consolidated in our contact centres all over the world, allowing us to suggest continuous improvements for each client and at every stage of customer care in the sector.

Imagine you’re shopping on a global ecommerce website, browsing and adding items to your cart. Whether you are buying an exotic holiday, a fashionable pair of shoes or just a blender, you might need some kind of support or additional info at some stage of the buying process. You search all over the website looking for an answer, but can’t find customer resources written in your language or a local number to call for help. Feeling frustrated, you exit the tab and seek out alternatives.

Not only is this a common problem for international shoppers, but it’s also an issue for businesses looking to expand overseas. Without proper ways to communicate with your international customers, it’s difficult to grow global sales or repeat business.

Through a number of specialized contact centers, Transcom can provide quality multilingual customer support in 33 languages and meet the needs of global market leaders as well as those of emerging brands willing to expand into new territories.

Belgrade, Budapest, Gdansk, Lisbon, Riga…: these are just some of the cities where we have developed Transcom multilingual hubs. These cities offer excellent infrastructures, a stable political and social situation, high levels of schooling and professionalism among the population, and widespread familiarity with foreign languages.

Several global companies have already chosen Transcom as strategic partner to offer their international customers the best assistance in their native language. Partnering with a single experienced business process outsourcer, capable to set up a pan-European contact center to support all customers of any nationality implies significant advantages:

consistent (high) level of customer experience provided to all users, based on common business processes, proven training and quality monitoring methods, shared best practices across all operations;

unique point of contact for managing customer care activities in multiple countries;

Early in April, Transcom began managing customer service for famil.care, a new digital platform created to allow family caregivers to protect their loved ones remotely, look after their everyday needs, and provide assistance in an emergency.

Why was the service created? According to a Doxa survey commissioned by famil.care, about 19 million people in Italy receive daily assistance from their families: 13.4 million over 65s (a figure that is expected to reach 22 million in 2050) and 5.2 million children from 7 to 15 years old. About 15 million people (mainly women between the ages of 45 and 50) provide daily assistance for family members. These caregivers share their time between home and work, trying to get on with their own lives while taking care of their loved ones.

What is the new famil.care platform? It’s an app that offers a very simple way to make sure loved ones are safe and sound at all times, even at a remote location, and to receive alerts if ageing parents or children find themselves in difficulty. All interactions and checks are channeled through the family’s smartphones, which are connected to a simple, discrete device that the elderly person or child wears at all times, with an emergency button for them to press if they need help.

The famil.care service is already available in Italy, the UK, Germany and France. Transcom has been selected to provide the multilingual customer service to support famil.care users from the company’s Milan site. The service is managed over both voice and chat channels, with an integrated approach that uses a specially designed solution developed in its entirety by Transcom. While clearly technology-intensive, the service is harmonized by the human relationship established with specialist operators.

Every customer service project is special for the Transcom people who provide it, but when it comes to healthcare, as in this case, the human factor becomes even more important and the focus on quality is paramount across the entire team.

The latest Whirlpool refrigerator is far more than just a humble cold cabinet. It’s a smart device. So when the connection fails, and the frustrated customer starts calling, a Transcom customer service agent is there to help them – and their fridges – keep their cool.

Transcom became a strategic Whirlpool partner in 2014, when the global white goods giant acquired a controlling stake in Italian household appliance group Indesit. Transcom had provided Indesit with customer contact services since 2007: a coopera­tion that began with five European countries and quickly grew to cover 12. Today Transcom provides customer assistance services for Whirlpool in some 20 countries throughout EMEA, in 28 different languages. And there seems to be a great demand for these services. In EMEA alone, Transcom’s agents receive a staggering 10 million e-mails and calls from Whirlpool’s customers every year: or 30,000 a day.

In the first year of its partnership with Transcom, Whirlpool’s operating costs were optimized, mainly thanks to Whirlpool being able to whittle down the number of providers to just one thanks to Transcom’s multi-language services, located in just four contact centers. “This means I just have one number to call and one person to speak to if I have a problem now. It makes life so easy,” says Stefano Ballerini, Customer Service Manager EMEA at Whirlpool.

“For every day that goes by, domestic appliances are getting smarter and smarter,” explains Ballerini “and they require a whole new level of customer service. The agents need to know everything about internet connections, routers and so forth to be able to deal effectively with this kind of reality,” he says, adding that, already today, his company relies a great deal on the Transcom agents’ knowledge to avoid real-life technician intervention and still keep Whirlpool’s customers happy and satisfied.

“Although the cost-savings are of course of great importance to the cooperation between Whirlpool and Transcom working so well, it is particularly Transcom’s flexibility, responsiveness and loyalty that I appreciate”, adds Ballerini.“When you walk into the customer assistance services center in Budapest, you feel like you’re in a Whirlpool center. Everything is Whirlpool branded and everyone is talking Whirlpool – to the point, in fact, that we gave the Transcom agents the same Christmas gifts we gave our own staff, because they really feel part of our team.”

“We are true partners,” Ballerini says. “We work together, we fight together and we always come out with a joint decision. This is so, so important.”

This is an abbreviated version of an article that appeared in the latest issue of the Hello Transcom magazine, written by Louise Nordström.

Transcom Italia has been assigned the 2016 best Customer Relationship Management award by a panel of experts from the CMMC Club, the association for companies and service providers working in the client relations supply chain. For CMMC, the award is a way to promote businesses that stand out, in a particularly complicated period for the sector, for the excellence of the initiatives put in place to improve their organization, in terms of both financial results and the internal climate among associates, by developing partnership relationships and innovating customer relationship processes.

The reasons for the award

In 2016, Transcomidentified several areas for optimization in the customer assistance processes of leading online travel operator Lastminute.com, for which it has been managing customer care activities since 2015, in a dozen or so languages. In partnership with Datachronic, a company that specializes in Robotic Process Automation (RPA) solutions to improve the efficiency of corporate procedures, Transcom has introduced several process automation measures for Lastminute.com services. A new web platform has been developed to automatically dispatch back office activities to the first agent available on the basis of the Client’s real priorities. The dispatching platform includes an integrated, user friendly web interface that provides real time checking of all the fields entered manually by the operator. In practice, it acts as an “Automatic Checker” for booking data, guaranteeing that the Lastminute.com system is aligned with airline websites, for example, across all stages in the booking process. If any discrepancies are detected, the system suggests corrections.

Last September, Lastminute.com also decided to introduce the “Transcom Quality Centre”, a system that collects and classifies all quality monitoring results to analyze the points of strength and areas for improvement of each project, team or individual operator. This proprietary Transcom solution provides a quick way to introduce continuous improvement measures, which are essential in such a dynamic and constantly evolving sector.

“We are extremely proud of this award and I would like to thank my team, our client Lastminute.com and Datachronic for their contributions to obtaining this acknowledgement,” said Transcom General Manager for Central and Southern Europe Gianluca Gemma. “At a time when there is much talk about technological innovation, virtualization and robotics applied to customer relations, we are convinced that operating efficiency can also be achieved through process innovation, by studying solutions to make the human relationship with end users more effective and improve the quality of our agents’ work.”

On the left, TRANSCOM represented by Global Account Manager Debora Mendola and General Manager, Central and Southern Europe Gianluca Gemma; on the right, lastminute.com group Operations Director Giorgio Bonafini

Transcom affirms its leading position as a provider of excellent customer care services for the white goods sector, which contribute to our clients’ growth and competitiveness. Last October, one of the world’s top manufacturers of household appliances, with operations in over 100 countries worldwide, commissioned Transcom to implement the brand’s European Contact Center, providing assistance to customers in 15 countries. The agreement covers multichannel management of inbound and outbound contacts and back office activities in 20 languages.

Given the variety and complexity of the language skills required, Transcom decided to deliver the service out of the company’s multi-language hub in Belgrade, Serbia, which was set up a few years ago and has a team of highly qualified staff. For some time now, Transcom has been successfully managing several multi-lingual projects in Belgrade for leading international clients in various sectors.

Transcom was selected primarily for its long-standing experience in the household appliance sector and particularly for its expertise in call avoidance processes that reduce the cost of on-site technical assistance. Transcom has become a highly specialized partner to companies in this important sector.

The time spent on training for the new project in Belgrade was optimized by taking advantage of the experience gained by staff working at other Transcom sites on similar projects in the same sector. The personnel involved shared their best practices with the Serbian site to ensure that the start-up process was quick and efficient.

The team of white goods specialists selected for this new project also work in a special area at Transcom’s Serbia site, which includes a sort of ‘showroom’ containing the appliances for which they provide customer care. With this showroom located next to the workstations, our personnel can touch and see firsthand the products for which they are providing technical and commercial assistance, guaranteeing that the customer experience is of the very highest level.

Another value of the service offered by Transcom is the generation of additional business for the client. During each contact, customer care staff present the case for users to purchase warranty extensions on their products, generating sales and profit for our client.